invention

The video is of an effect known in fluid dynamics as the coalescence cascade, which can be observed (provided you have access to a video camera with a sufficiently high frame rate) when a drop of liquid is deposited very gently onto the surface of a layer of the same liquid.

When a droplet impacts a pool at low speed, a layer of air trapped beneath the droplet can often prevent it from immediately coalescing into the pool. As that air layer drains away, surface tension pulls some of the droplet’s mass into the pool while a smaller droplet is ejected. When it bounces off the surface of the water, the process is repeated and the droplet grows smaller and smaller until surface tension is able to completely absorb it into the pool.

Pretty awesome, right? In the video shown up top, the effect manages to repeat itself four times (in what scientists who study fluid mechanics call “events”) before the viscous properties of the resting pool become too strong for the smallest drops to withstand coalescing completely. MIT’s John Bush claims to have observed as many as seven such events in a row.

What you see above is the “diverging diamond,” a freeway-and-surface-street interchange system that reduces the number of conflict points and, in theory, traffic delays, by having drivers switch to the left-hand side of the road temporarily. It’s a French innovation, but it’s starting to catch on in the states.

During WW II Lockheed (unbelievable 1940’s pictures). This is a version of special effects during the 1940’s. I have never seen these pictures or knew that they had gone this far to protect themselves. During World War II the Army Corps of Engineers needed to hide the Lockheed Burbank Aircraft Plant to protect it from a possible Japanese air attack. They covered it with camouflage netting to make it look like a rural subdivision from the air.

Despite its incredibly low density, aerogel is one of the most powerful materials on the planet. It can support thousands of times its own weight, block out intense heat, cold and sound – yet it is 1,000 times less dense than glass, nearly as transparent and is composed of 99.8% air. The lowest-density silica-based aerogels are even lighter than air.

A 2.5 kg brick is supported by a piece of aerogel weighing only 2 grams.